Loving the Rebellious Body
Imaginal immune tea time part 2
What if our bodies’ unwellness is an expression of unwillingness to perpetuate empire?
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In the ongoing attempt to cultivate peace with my autoimmuny body, I’ve been in deep contemplation about the purpose and power of adaptation. Allopathic medicine uses the language of war to describe health and illness - we “overcome” or we “lose the battle” against foreign invaders. I find this battle mentality suspect in any conversation about life processes. When the disease is created from within, when our “soldiers” are what cause us to be unwell, it is even clearer that we need a reframe.
The cogs and catches of this culture of consumption depend on obedient sacrifice. This country was built on forced labor, and the current global economy sustains it. As long as the means of production are not in the hands of workers, as long as the services and products we labor to make enrich company owners, as long as there is such a thing as profit, only partial liberation is possible.
This mind, conditioned to seek comfort and security and whatever promises belonging, however false, wants me to be a good capatalist. To work for whatever wages I can get until I collapse.
This body, containing a vast intelligence made of all the life there has ever been, wants me to remember vitality and breath. To feel the preciousness of flesh and branch, blood and brook.
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One of the most pervasive symptoms of what doctors call multiple sclerosis in this body is perpetual fatigue. A bone-deep tired that increases the dificulty of most tasks, especially those requiring focus, and allows me a smaller number of productive hours each week than most jobs require.
It is an ongoing practice to not lament or label myself lazy when I cannot get out of bed, or it takes days to accomplish a task I think will take a few hours.
I am grappling with the possibility that this is not my body betraying me, as much as my mind wants to frame it as that, but rather the vast intelligence of this particular node of the web of life rebelling against the edicts of a culture and economy built on productivity. That it is an adaptation to the conditions of my life.
The more I learn about potential causes for MS, the less I think knowing the exact cause matters. What seems to matter more is how I can accept and celebrate a wisdom wider than my preferences and personality. A wisdom born of surviving millenia through varying circumstances. A wisdom so much older than the idea that our worth is made by how much we produce.
I may never know if this perspective is objectively verifiable or a fantasy made to help me cope with the debilitation and loss of this “incurable” disease, but maybe it doesn’t matter. We make meaning, after all. Meaning is not inherent in our experiences but rather a product of our interpretations.
So the meaning I make is that this cosmically intelligent body is far smarter than any system human minds have made in the last thousand years, and is refusing to let me work for anything or anyone less than life-serving. They adapted to resist the mechanations of capitalist grind culture by forcing me to rest. My precious functional hours must be offered to tasks that matter to me.
And intimately, all-encompassingly, I must come to embody the truth:
Our worth is not measured by our work.
We are inherently worthy. We get to enjoy our lives for the few moments we have. We are not here to feed machines. And our bodies will increasingly rebel against the grind of exploitation until we change the system. And this system is precarious, and has already begun to auto-destruct. We can smell the sea change on the wind.
To rebel now is not to become another army. Rebels now get to let the wisdom of our bodies inspire us to imagine and co-create a world beyond war and exploitation. We, the vastly intelligent still-wild parts of life, will still be here after collapse, even as we lose so much in the process. We will continue to adapt.
As John Lennon and Yoko Ono imagined: “War is over, if you want it.”
Long live rebel scum.
